Cat5e or what?

[tabbypurr]

Indeed. OTOH I remember when 10M was amazingly fast. Whatever goes in will become obsolete, make sure it's all fairly easy to replace.

NT

[johnjessop46]

Can't comment on the vagaries or benefits of cat5/6 but in practice I use e l cheapo (ebay) cat 5e for my cctv around the farm. Just run inaccessible r outes in tube to enable drawing through replacements in the event of damage etc. Cable around twelve quid a hundred metres, tubing anything to hand. I 've got one cable carrying three locally powered cameras with the fourth on e of the pairs for ptz control in the future. One of my runs to the front gate is 85 metres.

[Adrian]

Have to admit, I think I'd just be starting off wirelessly.

[T i m]

Ok.

I will insist my mate runs all cable that is likely to be covered in a conduit of some kind and if sharing a conduit with some power, it would be suitably isolated by the conduit etc.

So that's likely to be to copper covered steel John?

It's a farm, that's how it is eh? ;-)

Cool.

That's quite a run but has the advantage of being in an electrically 'quiet' environment (not that the cable material should have any impact on that).

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

There will be wireless in there of course for all the 'portable / mobile' kit and may be used temporarily where the PC's are WiFi enabled, but I think (from his experience with wireless in his other shops) he would prefer the simple function/reliability of some bounded networking (and I'd have to agree with him).

In another shop the router was in a back office but you couldn't get reliable WiFi signal in the front. He got one of those WiFi 'repeaters' and whilst it helped it was a bit restricted where you could actually put it (spare plug socket that wasn't already used or where the repeater could be easily stolen etc) and whilst it would still be in range of the router and to actually help in the front of the shop. Had I been consulted I might have suggested a Powerline WiFi adaptor or an AP in the front counter in the mini switch.

In this new place there is a 'mid office' where the router and main 'back office' PC's will be with network cables running forward to the main counter and a couple of other working areas. There will also be some network cables going to the rear of the shop where they will have a stock store / a PC station / deliveries etc.

Al I have suggested so far is that the sparks should run some network cable(s) to every discrete location and they can just use what they need etc.

Router 16 Port switch 24 port Krone / RJ45 patch etc out to wherever double RJ45 wall / floor / in-cabinet sockets.

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Nearly all our kit is Gb (NIC's / Switches etc) and much of the cable still Cat3 and it all seems to work (at least) ok.

When my server runs a daily backup on this XP Mac Mini it makes it run very slow so the bottleneck is probably just the machine / OS.

Cheers, T i m

[F]

I've just extended my network to the garage so I can put a NAS box out of sight of anyone with sticky fingers. I'm usually shifting large backup files so, for the difference in cost, there was little point in not using Cat 6.

[Dave Liquorice]

Cable is cheap, labour/access to install it isn't. If there is a need for a network point fit two and two cables (1 Gb uses all four pairs).

And is less tolerant of being pulled and kinked during installation. CAT5e will be fine but ensure it is copper not CCS or CCA. Might be worth checking if the CCTV is going to use PoE IP cameras or coax and twisted pair. Personally I'd be looking hard at IP based CCTV solutions, there are some pretty highspec cameras out there for not many pennies. Ones with on board recording, PIR detection, IR illumination, 3 M pixel or more resolution.

[tabbypurr]

That's what I did. Of course I've had to do more wiring since, as 2 per point proved inadequate. I'll try not to make that mistake next time.

NT

[dennis]

You have to make sure the lens is up to it. Normal CCTV lenses are not going to give a good picture on a 3/5 Mpixel sensor.

[T i m]

What sort of money are we looking at for a 305m roll of solid copper Cat5e please. I've seen all sorts of prices mentioned but I'm interested what people in the know are *actually* paying?

And I know *I* would be careful doing that, I can't vouch for anyone else.

In the other shop it's coax but it has been in there a while now.

Understood. I'm not advising on that side of it so out of my hands. That said, if he is offered a choice he may well ask for my advice / opinion but it's likely to come down to price and his perception of value to him.

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Ok, and house fires.

Fair enough.

When I upgraded my switch from 100M to Gb, I monitored the network usage and the general time taken to do stuff. Given that the ends were Gb and the cables short and able to support such, I can't say I really saw much difference in the overall throughput, suggesting any bottlenecks were elsewhere (like HDD access etc).

I think I looked into it and think I remember the use of a higher performance NIC in the server, the basic 'on board' solutions weren't typically very efficient?

Cheers, T i m

[F]

Pushing a 50GB file across the 25M of Cat 6 to the Proliant G8 server in the garage I get a transfer speed of ~600Mbps.

[Adrian Caspersz]

IME Don't really need to go much beyond four per point for normal business users.

1. Printer
2. Desktop
3. Adhoc Laptop
4. Phone

However I once worked on an office build where 2 points were provided for PCs and Phones. They'd forgotten each user had their own laser printer which (due to the house system software) had to be installed networked.

Opps.

[whisky-dave]

Our IT peolpe installed a lot of pretty purple cable last year.

UTP-305m-558767

unlikely to have ordered it from above probbley went to RS where prices can be over £230 for 105M

[www.GymRatZ.co.uk]

To my mind, there's always a power supply at every data outlet and when a 4 port Gigabit switch costs less than £20 there's little point in running loads of extra wire. Far neater to have a single wire coming out of the wall to a switch hidden behind something.

:)

[T i m]

I'll have to test mine but being yours is a 'real' server (focused on i/o and not economy like mine) is likely to be much better an ant generic PC hardware running as a server.

Cheers, T i m

[www.GymRatZ.co.uk]

to my mind Cat5 is going to be around for a very long time. There must be millions of miles of the stuff in commercial buildings.

A bit like copper telephone wires to the house, signal technology will always evolve for the most popular medium. Slowest annoyance will be the upstream from his internet connection. It's going to be a fair while before an upstream of 100Mbps becomes commonplace let alone Gbps.

For me, Cat6 is nothing more than a way of fudging around a slight improvement to existing signal technology. It's a stop-gap between major technology advances.... e.g. Li-Fi completely new technology not reliant on outdated transfer mediums.

:)

[tony sayer]

I think that Purple one is fire retardent or resistant>=...

[Dave Liquorice]

connection.

becomes

It's only just over 10 years ago that ADSL appeared here, that's ADSL2 "up to 8 Mbps" not ADSL2+, we get around 5 Mbps. It's starting to feel "slow", but we are too far from the exchange/cabinet for ADSL2+ or VDSL to improve things. Roll on FTTRN or better, sensible prices for FTTPoD ...

Before ADSL that we had ISDN, only ever used a single channel so a massive 64 kbps and nice step up from dialup at 28.8 kbps or up to 56 kbps compressed. Seemed OK at the time but can you imagine trying to use the modern web at 64 kbps? With sites that use 500 k bytes of javascript just to display "hello world". As for streaming video or even downloading, 1 G Byte (roughly the size of 1 hours HD iPlayer) would take over 36 hours to download...